6. Pop culture or academia?7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?9. Food you could eat everyday.

10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?I walk 2 miles a days, some softball and racquetball

11. What kind of music speaks to you?jazz

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?I roughly figure out where I want a novel to end up; short stories, never.

13. Celebrity crush.14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?

15. Do you still watch cartoons?Futurama

Tom Monteleone has been a professional writer since 1972, and 4-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. He has published more than 100 short stories in numerous magazines and anthologies. His stories have been nominated for many awards, and have appeared in lots of best-of-the-year compilations. His notorious column of opinion and entertainment, The Mothers And Fathers Italian Association, currently appears in Cemetery Dance magazine. He is the editor of seven anthologies, including the highly acclaimed Borderlands series edited with his wife, Elizabeth, of which, Borderlands 5, won a Bram Stoker Award in 2003.

He has written for the stage and television, having scripts produced for American Playhouse (which won him the Bronze Award at the International TV and Film Festival of New York and the Gabriel Award), George Romero’s Tales from the Darkside, and a series on Fox TV entitled Night Visions. He has written many feature-length screenplays, none of which have been produced, but have made him plenty of money anyway.

He likes baseball, the Baltimore Ravens, computers, sour mash whiskey, fine wines, comic books, tons of books to read, all kinds of music (except the stuff sung by people wearing big hats or pants down to their knees), and teaching his kids how to be independent thinkers. Despite being dragged kicking and screaming into his fifties (and losing his hair), he still thinks he is dashingly handsome—humor him. With his wife, Elizabeth, and daughter, Olivia, he recently moved from the frozen tundra (is there any other kind?) of New Hampshire to the rolling hills of Maryland.

Monday, June 25, 2007

2. Tell me about your travels.Any fellow Duranies reading this one will laugh because all of my travels—much like theirs—the past 10 or so years, have centered around Duran Duran concerts. Going back in time, I've been to Miami, New Orleans, Manchester and Brum, England, Orlando, Kansas City, St. Louis, Tampa, Sunrise, (and here's where the timeline gets fuzzy) Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Denver. And most of those have been multiple hits. I had one trip that I won to see Sting over in Paris. That was tres cool. (No, I don't speak French, but a friend coached me on enough phrases to get me through the whirlwind mini-vacation.) Then there were travels for Duran parties, not shows. Those are always fun. The point here is that I have crazed friends in a lot of cities now because of this band that we enjoy seeing. I'll be flying up to New York to see them on my birthday this year. How cool is that? It's a fan-club-members-only show in an intimate venue so I'm going to be in a concert hall with a couple thousand of my sistahs watching/listening to a group I'm obsessed with to celebrate my day. That is a good vacation.

The traveling gene was activated in me upon birth. I think the doctor hit me to get me breathing when I entered the world and it knocked the "will-be-able-to-acclimate-readily" chip into place because I've always been on the move. See, that doctor was on Homestead Airforce Base—I was a military child. I had moved 18 times—including a year in Mallorca, Spain—before I got to college. I inadvertently built this experience into my main character in Choices Meant for Gods. It wasn't until I was preparing an interview for the CMFG Online Book Tour that it hit me: I put Chariss through that same instability. She's been on the run from a madman her whole life, moving from place to place, never settling down, never knowing the security of a consistent home environment. She craves it by the time we meet her in the novel.

3. Coffee, tea, or milk? 4. What else can you do besides write?

5. Who are you reading right now?Virginia McMorrow (a fellow ArcheBooks author; I edited her most recent Firewing's Shadow so now I'm going back and reading her Mage Confusion trilogy -- fabulous); Dawn Scovill's Immortal Bonds (a fellow ArcheBooks author (VAMPIRES! Woohoo!); Raven Bower's Apparitions (a fellow ArcheBooks author -- I'll never swim in a lake again); Jamieson Wolf's Hunted (a Friday Project author -- I'm a character in this one! I've read it before, but I'm re-reading it so I can write a current review); Juliet Barker's The Brontes A Life in Letters (I've picked through this before for research purposes but I've never sat down and read it straight through -- I'm hanging my head in shame); The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte.

6. Pop culture or academia?7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?9. Food you could eat everyday.10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?

11. What kind of music speaks to you?All of it. But, to be real specific, see the answer to the travel question above. I listen to just about any kind of music that's playing anywhere. I played the violin, flute, and f-horn in junior and high school. I still have the violin and flute, but both get neglected in favor of the writing career. Anyway, I think those instruments fostered my appreciation of classical music (that and Vivaldi and Chopin were just geniuses). But I'm into anything with a beat (or without). If you look at my profile on my blog, you get a small sampling of some of the things I listen to, but they don't give you enough "room" to list enough. Duran Duran (Arcadia's So Red the Rose album in particular) and Barry Manilow had the greatest influences on my writing during the creation of Choices Meant for Gods, but I have a folder on my iTunes called "Music to Write to" that speaks to me when I'm in the mood for a long writing stretch. It's quite eclectic.

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?It depends on which characters are visiting that day. If Caleb (vampire) is in the room, he looks for the notebooks with the outlines for the vampire stories. He wants order and organization and meticulous attention to detail. Drives me nuts. But I guess that kind of planning helps you survive if you would go up in flames at sunrise without advance planning.

If Nigel Taiman from Choices Meant for Gods is in the room, I'm a happy gal. We just start writing and see where the story's going. He's a fabulous muse to work with. He shackles me to the writing desk and off we go. That's the way to write. Now, this isn't to say I don't know what's happening with the books in the Choices Meant for Gods trilogy. The story is worked out and I have the elements written down, but this is not the "outline" that Caleb demands.Choices Meant for Gods

13. Celebrity crush.Again, the Duranies are laughing. I've been madly in love with John Taylor from Duran Duran since…oh…1983? Listen to the man. Read a couple interviews with him. Then go to one of their concerts and watch him on stage. I guarantee you'll be obsessed, too. Deliriously obsessed. But be careful. He's devoted to his wife (half the attraction, I'm sure). Sigh. I've got this picture of us (and that felt good to type) from December where I've got this really happy smile on my face and I don't look like a stalker at all…

14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?Jesus Christ—kept that PG rating from going anywhere crazy on Choices Meant for GodsCharlotte Bronte (as well as Emily and Anne)Duran Duran (as well as Arcadia)ChaucerWhoever wrote Beowulf (I'm finding him when I get to Heaven so I can shake his hand)All those Old English/Anglo-Saxon warriors!DragonsMy muses

15. Do you still watch cartoons?

Sandy Lender began writing stories as soon as she learned to string words together on the page. As a child she entertained the folks in her great grandmother’s apartment building in Southern Illinois with tales of squeaky spiders and mice picking berries, and then won awards with writing projects as she moved through the elementary and high school systems in the St. Louis area. It was apparent that a career in journalism was her calling, and she found herself proofreading, editing, and (finally) writing for trade publications after she graduated from Truman State University in Missouri. Now she writes in Southwest Florida where her love of sea turtles and all things related to the Gulf waters keeps her imagination growing. Her epic fantasy novel Choices Meant for Gods is now available from ArcheBooks Publishing. You can get information about grammar and writing from her main blog Today the Dragon Wins.

1. Which of your characters is your favorite?This is a difficult question, and that's why I decided to answer it. I like a challenge at times, as long as it's mental and not physical. So, really, my favorite characters I write challenge me and present me with stuff that I had no clue was coming, or are more complex than I ever thought they would be. To pick one is tough, since I have so many of their voices yammering in my head. Since I am focused on my current novel rough draft, I'd have to pick one from there. Lazarus - he is a drunk, a lecher, a spirit seeker (one who puts the souls of the dead to rest), yet when he feels something is wrong, he wants to make it right, and he's willing to help after some cajoling (and being taken down a couple rungs), even with his not-so-appealing personality. The thing that makes him the most interesting to me, is the drinking and sleeping around are merely a way for him to seek the warmth from a life full of coldness. I still think there's so much more about him I have yet to discover.

2. Tell me about your travels.3. Coffee, tea, or milk?

4. What else can you do besides write?I tend to be mediocre at many things, not really excel at certain things. I feel I have a moderate talent at drawing - nothing looks totally realistic, but I enjoy doing it. Cross-stitching is another favorite pastime, as well as video games (Everquest addict kind of - hey it takes patience to learn how to play a character to its best potential!).

5. Who are you reading right now?6. Pop culture or academia?

7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?The type of scenes that are toughest for me are physical fight scenes. It might be because I don't know enough about weapons or the martial arts, but I always have a difficult time writing scenes like this. So, I can't say there was one horribly tough scene because all of these are a pain for me. I'd rather be in the middle of verbal banter or high emotional scenes then in the middle of a fast-paced action fight.

8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?Some of what I decide to write comes from dreams. Just a little snippet of a dream can unravel a whole novel idea in my head. Many times I get images flashing in my head when I listen to music - I would say that's my biggest inspiration. The novel I am currently working on started as a strong image of a woman in colorful wraps who refused to/could not speak and I knew her title was Shepherd of Dreams, and many other things about her flashed in my mind as well - this all from one song that I listened to (and my husband will attest to me putting single songs on repeat). A song is worth a thousand words...or a hundred thousand...

9. Food you could eat everyday.10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?

11. What kind of music speaks to you?I listen to all sorts of stuff, and most of it speaks to me, telling me there's a story that could be fueled by it. Most of what I listen to lately is gothic, alternative, some hard rock. I also have the odd video game/anime soundtracks that are quite fun and relaxing. Oh, and I can't forget Madonna - I've been listening to her since I was 9 or 10 years old.

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?The characters take me along for a ride. ;) I detest outlining. It stifles me. Usually when I start something, I have the character first, or a little about the character. I'm telling that character's story (or characters' stories), and if I have an outline, it wouldn't give the character a chance to grow and for me to learn new things about them. I like the freedom of just plowing ahead and knowing that a turn might be taken that I never expected.

13. Celebrity crush.14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?15. Do you still watch cartoons?

Alexa Grave has been writing fantasy for over thirteen years, since she was fourteen. Her first attempts were anything but publishable. Her writing ability has only grown since the beginning, and she knows there's plenty of room to improve - it will always be a learning process.

Alexa's life isn't filled with writing alone; she has a supportive husband (who thinks he puts up with too much at times, like any spouse), three cats, two turtles, and a fish tank. Her thirteen-year-old goldfish (to the day of winning him at a fair) passed away on July 4, 2006. Until his death, he was the only thing in her life that was older than her love of writing.

4. What else can you do besides write?Wow, big assumption there... turns out I've never been really good at anything. BUT I've always had some success--after tremendous pain, sufferance, and especially hard work.

6. Pop culture or academia?7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?

9. Food you could eat everyday.Chicken and Rice (In fact, I do eat that almost everyday.)

10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?11. What kind of music speaks to you?

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?Outline very roughly... then, after long painful plodding, and if life is good--at some point, usually around the 3/4 point, I get on the magic bus--and ride the last chunk with relative ease.

13. Celebrity crush.14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?15. Do you still watch cartoons?

Darren Moore currently lives in Phoenix but works in downtown Manhattan (as a computer consultant).

"I think of myself as extremely sexy but find few people to agree. Oh, I've been submitting stories to mostly contests (and have won a good many). My latest piece of good news was from William Horner at Fantasist Enterprises, he would like to include my work in Fantastical Visions V. Thanks Will!"

Friday, June 15, 2007

1. Which of your characters is your favorite?Right now, it's a character dedicated to my late nephew from my current WIP. I named the character after him as a way to honor his memory. He died several years ago from Hodgkin's Disease. Too young to go, but taken anyway.

2. Tell me about your travels.Best vacation so far was to Scotland two years back, when we went to Worldcon and stayed over to see the sites in Edinburgh. Saw the military tattoo, took a boat out on Loch Ness, and crawled through the siege tunnels in the castle outside St. Andrews.

3. Coffee, tea, or milk?Both. Tea in the morning and evening when I make it for my wife and daughters before heading off to work. Coffee at work, because it's there and I don't have to make it. Never milk. Unless it's in cereal. Had a bad experience as a kid once where I accidentally tried butter milk on corn flakes. Didn't put me off cereal, but it killed milk drinking for me. I find it hard to handle chocolate milk even.

6. Pop culture or academia?7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?9. Food you could eat everyday.

10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?I try to work out at the Y as often as possible. Mostly weight lifting. Running gives me chills.

11. What kind of music speaks to you?There isn't one band or segment I prefer over another. I like groups from several different decades, but those that come to mind first are "oldies": The Beatles, ELO, The Eurhythmics, Chicago. I'm a sucker for some musicals, though. I'll sit down and watch "Scrooge" with Albert Finney or "Brigadoon" with Gene Kelly given the chance.

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?Mostly, I'm a passenger. The muse thinks a lot faster than I can write. Luckily, I'm OK with the idea of rewriting. Which is why productivity is a contradiction in terms.

13. Celebrity crush.

14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?I'm fond of Stephen King. When I first started reading "adult" books, I stumbled across Salem's Lot and The Shining. Then there's Lois McMaster Bujold. She does a lot of good things with characterization that I enjoy, and experiments with her material, trying new things as a writer, despite winning so many accolades she could just sit back and enjoy the adulation. Frank Herbert, Lester Dent, Warren Murphy, James Clavell, Tim Powers, China Mieville. Writers who make the experience of sitting down and reading enjoyable . It's hard to read a book where the writer or editor in my head doesn't take over, so I place entertainment high on my list.

15. Do you still watch cartoons?Many cartoons nowadays are pretty smart. I catch Danny Phantom in the mornings with my youngest daughter, and I'm amazed at how well they do with building character arc into a 30-minute toon.

Steve Nagy spends his days on the phone, working customer support for a software company. His lunches and evenings see time split between the roles of father, husband and writer. So he's more juggler than anything else.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Usually the one I'm currently writing. Maggot, the title character of The Prodigal Troll and some stories in F&SF, is so much fun to write because he's such a fish out of water, neither man nor troll, and never really understanding other culture. People see him and think Tarzan, but the whole point of Tarzan is that he fits in everywhere, learns everything, masters every environment. Maggot's much more confused and dysfunctional than that, and in his shock at war or his reluctance to kill, he's more heroic to me than many other heros. The Prodigal Troll

Then there's Proctor Brown, the Massachusetts minuteman who discovers he's a witch. He's in a story coming out in F&SF and is the main character in a current novel project. I like him because I like the Revolutionary period, the real bravery and sacrifice that was involved, and here is a character who embodies all that along with some of the less noble history before that and the contradictions that arise from that history.

I also just finished writing another Maxim Nikomedes novella. Max is the protagonist in The Political Officer, and he's jaded and cynical and a compulsive liar, which makes him tremendously fun to write. I expect to do more with Max if I sell the new story.

2. Tell me about your travels.

3. Coffee, tea, or milk?Yes.

Morning, evening, and cereal.

4. What else can you do besides write?

5. Who are you reading right now?I just finished serving a term -- and no, that's not meant to sound like prison -- as co-chair of the jury for the Andre Norton Award, so I received and read part or all of about a hundred novels this past year, many of them crammed into the final couple months before we made our decision. I'm recovering from that by reading magazines. I just caught up with the last three months of F&SF and have been perusing Strange Horizons. Besides that, I'm immersed in histories of the Revolution and witchcraft right now as research for the new project.

6. Pop culture or academia?I'm torn between the two, mostly because I suck in some ways at both. I mean, I didn't own a TV or go see hardly any movies for about ten years, and even before that my pop culture exposure was spotty. Ted Chiang did an intervention for me at Rio Hondo one year because I had never seen Blazing Saddles. So that all adds up to crappy pop culture street cred, you know? But I grew up on comic books and still have copies of the "Doomsday Plus One" comics that started John Byrne's career at Charlton and some of the old Mike Grell Warlords and even a few Captain Canucks, and now I have a dvd player and Netflix and love Buffy and Firefly and CSI, and all that is about as poppy as you get.

On the academic side, I've spent twelve years in universities because of changing majors and dropping out and going back. I've co-authored a chapter in a college textbook and was a graduate research assistant for two award-winning books on early American history, and I defended my master's thesis and then didn't earn because I failed to file the paper work in time. It's the same thing as pop culture: I've got some background, and some niches with things I love.

7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?9. Food you could eat everyday.10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?11. What kind of music speaks to you?

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?I outline longer works. Often I start out knowing what the final scene is and then it's a matter of finding out how my characters get there. Once in a while, though, I'll write something with serious off-road capability. While I'm writing, I'll come to a spot along the road I've planned and suddenly it'll veer off into the bush. I enjoy that too.

13. Celebrity crush.

14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?Burroughs, Tolkien, and Bujold are the writers who made me want to write. Like many apprentice writers emulating their idols -- think of Faulkner trying to write poetry like Elliot comes to mind, or Michael Shea's first novel published as a sequel to one of Jack Vance's books, (and there's that whole pop culture vs. academia question in a nutshell all over again) -- you can find some of my early works that riff on scenes or themes from Burroughs and Bujold, and another story is a satire on Tolkien. But then there are other stories where I was trying to master things done by Lieber, Sterling, Hemingway, and Lovecraft. We have a library at home with a few thousand books and magazines: these days, I point to the shelves and call it my tool box. When I'm trying to get the story out of my head and onto paper, I'll use whatever tools I can borrow from any of those writers.

15. Do you still watch cartoons?

Charles Coleman Finlay worked for John Galipault at the Aviation Safety Institute (a forerunner of Europe's Eucare safety project), briefly served as a studio assistant for porcelain artist Curtis Benzle, and studied Constitutional history with Saul Cornell, where he helped to research The Other Founders which won the 2001 Society of the Cincinnati Prize for history. He learned something about following one's passions from the first, about artistic vision from the second, and about disciplined writing from the third. All of it looks much more interesting in retrospect than it did at the time.

His first short story, Footnotes, a series of footnotes to a history article about a future disaster, appeared in the August 2001 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where he has since become a regular contributor. In 2003, he was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Sidewise, and John W. Campbell Awards. His fiction has appeared in Year's Best Science Fiction, Year's Best Fantasy, and the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, as well as numerous magazines and anthologies.

Besides writing fiction, he serves as Administrator for Online Writing Workshops and builds a research database for historians and constitutional scholars. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, USA, with his wife, writer Rae Dawn Carson, and where he does little else of interest and looks forward to more retrospect.

Monday, June 11, 2007

1. Which of your characters is your favorite?Ponter Boddit. He's a modern-day Neanderthal quantum-computing specialist in my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. I never start with a character; I'm a thematic writer, and I start by figuring out what I want to say on a high level, then construct the characters that let me get at that. Well, in Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids -- the three books of the trilogy -- I wanted to demonstrate two things: that being powerfully male wasn't at odds with being a pacifist, and being an atheist wasn't at odds with being moral. Ponter embodies both of those things; he's the kind of friend I think most people would like to have.

2. Tell me about your travels.Well, as I write this, I've just left Orlando, Florida, where I was guest of honor at the science-fiction convention Oasis 20; and I'm now in Sudbury, Ontario, where I was given an honorary doctorate by Laurentian University -- which was one of the absolute highlights of my life. Next month, my wife and I are off to Canada's arctic -- Dawson City, the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush. Pierre Berton, a famed Canadian nonfiction writer, donated his childhood home there to be a writing retreat. Writers apply to a jury to get to go for three months of isolated, uninterrupted writing time. We'll be there for July, August, and September, during which I hope to finish my eighteenth novel, Wake. However, it won't be quite uninterrupted: I've just learned that I'm being given China's top science-fiction award in August: the Galaxy Award, for most popular foreign author of the year. So, I'm off to Chengdu, the capital of Szechuan province, to attend the Chinese national science-fiction convention and receive the award. I spend about three or four months every year on the road, and I absolutely love it.

3. Coffee, tea, or milk?

4. What else can you do besides write?I have a thriving sideline as a keynote speaker at conferences. This month as I write this (June 2007), for instance, I'm giving keynote addresses at the annual meetings of the Cancer Patient Information Network in Montreal; the Canadian Public Relations Society in Edmonton; the Health Sciences Communications Association in Toronto; and Osprey Media -- a publisher of community newspapers -- in Collingwood, Ontario. I get paid as much for each of these one-hour talks as I got for an advance for my first novel, and I love doing it. I usually talk about the future -- the next five, ten, or twenty years -- and what's going to happen in whatever area the conference is focussing on. It's extrapolation and rational prediction -- all the things I do in writing my science fiction, and it's really gratifying to see businesses finally recognize that the best futurists out there are in fact science-fiction writers.

5. Who are you reading right now?As preparation for the trip to the Yukon, I'm reading I Married the Klondike, a Canadian nonfiction classic, by Pierre Berton's mother, Laura. It's charming and fascinating. And I'm just about dive into Douglas Hoffstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, which looks fascinating. Most of my reading right now is in the area of consciousness studies, computing, and game theory -- all of which will figure in my new novel, Wake.

6. Pop culture or academia?

7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?There's a scene in my Hugo-award nominated novel Frameshift set at the Treblinka death camp. It features real people -- real survivors, who staged a prison break from there. Obviously, what happened at Treblinka was horrific, and I felt an enormous obligation to get the details right, and to treat the survivors with dignity. After doing all the research, but before writing the scene, I went and sat outside for a long time at a Holocaust memorial in Toronto, really trying to hear the voices, if you will, of those who could no longer tell their stories.

8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?It really is in part through my travels. I mentioned the Holocaust memorial a moment ago; I think the best thing I've ever written is a chapter in Humans, the middle volume of my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, that's nothing but two people reading letters left at the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. The notion of the writer in the garret is nuts; yes, I'm going on a writing retreat this summer, but that's an aberration, and a special treat: a real writer has to be out there, seeing people and things.

9. Food you could eat everyday.10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?11. What kind of music speaks to you?

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?The farther along you go in your career, the less you have to write to get a book contract. That's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's good to know that your publisher has faith in you. On the other hand, it does mean that you can end up stumbling around, searching for your story. I confess to not doing a lot of outlining, and that means I do sometimes end up going down blind alleys; I typically throw out 20,000 words or so of draft material for every 100,000-word novel I write. But I find that I really do discover the best stuff -- the perfect symbolism, the most apt character bit -- in the act of actually fleshing out a scene; I just can't see that level of detail from a distance.

13. Celebrity crush.

14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?There's a saying that the golden age of science fiction is when you are 15 -- whenever that happened to be. Well, I was 15 in 1975, and the great writers of the mid- to late-seventies were Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, and Fred Pohl; they certainly had huge impacts on me. I credit my cosmic vistas to Clarke; my intriguing aliens to Niven; and my flawed humans to Pohl. My own view is that science fiction should combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic: I believe SF should give equal weight to "science" and "fiction," should speak both to the intellect and the heart.

15. Do you still watch cartoons?

Robert J. Sawyer — called "the dean of Canadian science fiction" by The Ottawa Citizen and "just about the best science-fiction writer out there these days" by The Denver Rocky Mountain News — is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the science-fiction field's top honors for best novel of the year: the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo Award, which he won in 2003 for his novel Hominids; the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award, which he won in 1996 for his novel The Terminal Experiment; and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won in 2006 for his novel Mindscan.

Rob is also the only writer in history to win the top SF awards in the United States, China, Japan, France, and Spain. In addition, he's won an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada as well as nine Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras").

Maclean's: Canada's Weekly Newsmagazine says, "By any reckoning, Sawyer is among the most successful Canadian authors ever," and Barnes and Noble calls him "the leader of SF's next-generation pack."

Rob's novels are top-ten national mainstream bestsellers in Canada, appearing on the Globe and Mail and Maclean's bestsellers' lists, and they've hit #1 on the bestsellers' list published by Locus, the U.S. trade journal of the SF field. His seventeen novels include Frameshift, Factoring Humanity, Flashforward, Calculating God, and the popular Neanderthal Parallax trilogy consisting of Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids.

He's often seen on TV, including such programs as Rivera Live with Geraldo Rivera, Canada A.M., and Saturday Night at the Movies, and he's a frequent science commentator for Discovery Channel Canada, CBC Newsworld, and CBC Radio. He has been the subject of an hour-long Canadian TV documentary ("In the Mind of Robert J. Sawyer"), profiled for an entire half-hour episode of "Credo," and twice been "in the hot seat" on Vision TV's "Test of Faith" with Valerie Pringle.

Rob has given talks at hundreds of venues including the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada, and been keynote speaker at dozens of events in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Boston, Tokyo, and Barcelona. He was born in Ottawa in 1960, and now lives just west of Toronto with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink.

Friday, June 08, 2007

1. Which of your characters is your favorite?All of them. Most recently it would have to be Mabel the Lovelorn Dwarf. I understand her, and she makes me laugh.

2. Tell me about your travels.I’ve had the travel bug every since I was a kid. My Dad was a teacher so we went camping every summer, traveling all over Canada and the U.S. My roommates in High School were from Hong Kong so in 1997 I spent 6 weeks traveling Asia with my friends and staying with their families. I was privileged to be there during the handover of Hong Kong to China, witnessing the fireworks from a barge in the Hong Kong Harbour one night, and from a skyscraper along the Harbour the next night. Most recently I spent a year living and working in Northern Ireland which in and of itself is a travel adventure. With my holiday time I had a mini-break in Venice one weekend, Paris over Christmas, and mini-breaks in London, Manchester, and week at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I still start most of my sentences with “When I was in …” and when I watch movies I frequently comment, “I was there, and there, and there.”

3. Coffee, tea, or milk?Usually it’s milk, but when I was in Northern Ireland, the ladies at work made the best cuppa tea, especially Bernie. I looked forward to Thursday mornings when she was in for one of her cuppa’s. I’m still looking for a proper cuppa and buiscuits.

4. What else can you do besides write?5. Who are you reading right now?6. Pop culture or academia?7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?

8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?Music used to be what gave me an idea for a story. Mabel is unique though. Mabel’s influence was more of a challenge. I was attending Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in the summer of 2005 and Jeanne Cavelos, our instructor, continually complained about there never being any stories about female dwarves, and she talked about one of the ways to get around the trap of genre clichés is to combine two genres or sub-genres that you like. For one of our journaling assignments I wrote a brief paragraph about Mabel the Lovelorn Dwarf to satisfy Jeanne’s need for a story about a female dwarf. But then I liked Mabel so much and decided that because I like chick-lit and Fantasy, I could combine them to create some originality with Mabel.

9. Food you could eat everyday.

10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?Watching, not playing. Love my hockey, Canadian football, soccer, tennis, figure skating, and I wish I could take holidays so I could watch Olympics. This does not bode well for my writing if I don’t start weaning myself of this addiction. Maybe I’ll consider it after the Stanley Cup final, or Wimbledon, oh but then it’s football so maybe after the Grey Cup?

11. What kind of music speaks to you?12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

4. What else can you do besides write?I can immediately imagine the worst case scenario in any given situation. (Good for putting my characters in peril, bad for my family’s blood pressure.) Oh, and I can blow spit bubbles off my tongue. As far as anything semi-useful, I had a wedding photography business for a while, until my sixteen month old twins arrived. Now I’m pretty good at chasing babies in two different directions.

5. Who are you reading right now?Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (enjoying so far), Michael Crichton’s Next (not enjoying so much), and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (brilliant and scaring the crap out of me). Oh, I also have Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day on my nightstand, but can’t seem to get through a few pages of it before my brain gets tied in knots.

6. Pop culture or academia?

7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?That would probably be a scene in Sahara's Song where a math genius, who thinks aliens have given him a message for the main character, must get her to understand the magic behind Phi. Being completely math-challenged, I had to first understand it myself, which took a few frustrating, hair-pulling days. (It really is as close to magic as real life gets.)

Here’s a sampling of the result: “For those of us that didn’t pass Algebra, what is Phi?”

Steven glanced up at her, the pencil suspended in mid-air, as if suddenly remembering where he was.

“Only the love of my life,” he said leaning back, his lips stretched into a crooked grin. His hands were moving about in the air again, as they did when he got excited. “You see, if you have two waves coming together at one point, they produce wavelengths that we can both add and multiply. Phi is the only equation that allows this to happen, letting waves interact in harmony. Her greatest attribute is that she allows patterns to be passed on, not only as ratio, but also as shape- the marriage of mathematics and geometry! She allows waves of different vibrations to condense into a standing wave form. She. . .she is the reason life exists! The infinite and non-repeating. . .the golden ratio!”

As a side-note here, isn’t this the greatest thing about being a fiction writer? You don’t have to pick one occupation. For a little while you get to be a math genius, or an FBI agent, a hit-man or a rock star. Research is one of my favorite parts of writing.

8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?Well, let’s see. On one end of the spectrum, I am inspired by the strength and greatness in humanity. On the other end, I am inspired by things that scare me about where we are headed. Hence, I write speculative fiction with characters that highlight human strengths. I am also inspired by fantastic writing, new scientific discoveries and chocolate.

9. Food you could eat everyday.10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?11. What kind of music speaks to you?

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?In all honesty, I get bored if I know the ending and outlining seems like a particularly cruel form of torture. For short stories, I usually just start out with a character in mind, put them in a situation and see how it plays out. For novels, the pattern has been—big question first (ex: what does it really mean to be human?), characters second and then—yep, you guessed it—just write and see how it plays out.

13. Celebrity crush.

14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?I’m sure every writer I’ve ever read, good or bad, has influenced me in important and unimaginable ways. The recent ones I am consciously aware of are: Ayn Rand, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, Robert J. Sawyer and Greg Bear.

Monday, June 04, 2007

1. Which of your characters is your favorite?At the moment, Leah Hamakawa, since right now I'm writing another story that features her (she's been in a couple of my stories before).

2. Tell me about your travels.How much time do you have?

3. Coffee, tea, or milk? 4. What else can you do besides write?5. Who are you reading right now?6. Pop culture or academia?7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?9. Food you could eat everyday.10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?

11. What kind of music speaks to you?When I'm writing, it has to be music that doesn't have words, so I tend to go with jazz, or else world music in some language I can't understand-- Afro-Brazillian, maybe, or African drumming. When it's just for pleasure, I'd listen to the same music I listened to when I was in college, which is old art-rock: Yes, possibly a little King Crimson, Rick Wakeman. I still find myself thinking "Nous somme du soleil; we love when we play" to myself, and it still seems as if it's saying something deep, although I suppose it's really not.

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?I've tried both. These days I mostly want to know where the story is going before I start, because I really hate getting halfway into a story and then discovering I don't know what happens next. I tried writing a story for Wil McCarthy's anthology of hard-SF fairy tales (Once Upon a Galaxy) a while back by the technique of just writing whatever came to me, and got a couple of thousand words in and realized I didn't know what happened next. A while later, my writing workshop said that everybody should bring in a fragment of something they didn't know how to finish, and I took a look at the pieces and said, "Ok, I think I know where this must be going." The anthology had come out years ago (without me), so I finished it off and sent it to Analog. (The story's called "Lazy Taekos;" it will be reprinted in the 2007 Best American Fantasy from Prime Books).

13. Celebrity crush.Used to be Sigourney Weaver from Aliens, but more recently, I'd have to say it's Hallie Berry from Catwoman. Vastly underrated movie; the plot was silly, but Hallie Berrie was perfect, just brilliant! Mrrrao!

14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?The hard SF writers of the late 60s and the 70s-- Larry Niven, John Varley. I'd love to say I was influenced by Ursula LeGuin, but I'm not that good. Lewis Carroll, a little bit-- sometimes I put things that are simply absurd into my work, just because I like the sound of it.

15. Do you still watch cartoons?I don't watch television very much when I'm at home (we don't get cable, and the TV's in the basement-- it gets about two and a half channels), but when I am near a TV, sure, I'll flip to the cartoon channel or Nick. And recently I've been trying to watch some anime, so I can learn about contemporary Japanese culture. What I've learned is that all Japanese are in high school and wear school uniforms, any one at any time is subject to suddenly gaining superpowers due to an ancient artifact choosing them to save the universe, and that having superpowers doesn't seem to help with your high school social life.

His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the Portugese translation of "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" won the Brazilian Reader's Poll award for best short story. His collection Myths, Legends, and True History was published in 1991 by Pulphouse as part of their Author's Choice Monthly series (now, unfortunately, out of print.)

He has published 400 scientific papers in the fields of photovoltaics and astronautics, holds four patents on photovoltaic device designs, has written dozens of articles about model rocket technology and edited several MIT Rocket Society reports, many of which can still be purchased from the NAR. He's written more technical reports that I really want to think about, and organized and served as the technical chairman of the Vision-21 symposium. He has flown the human-powered airplane "Chrysalis" and helped build both Chrysalis and also the prize-winning Monarch airplanes. He was involved in a project called SpaceCub to design a personal rocket for the hobby flyer. He was a regular participant in the Science Fiction Age "Science Forum", and has written 12 popular science articles, including "The Demon Under Hawaii," Analog, July 1992, winner of the AnLab reader's award for best science article. He has undergraduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering from MIT and received his PhD in solid-state physics from Brown University.

He was a member of the Sojourner Rover team on the successful Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997, and is currently a member of the science team on the Mars Exploration Rovers Mission, making spectacular discoveries while driving the rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity" around on the surface of Mars.

Friday, June 01, 2007

1. Which of your characters is your favorite?Cara Gamma from Daughters of Prime (a novelet forthcoming from F&SF). She’s a fieldworker on a distant planet who finds herself studying an agrarian village, the residents of which already seem to know everything about her.

2. Tell me about your travels.I went to Germany in the early seventies, refurbished a van with some friends and drove through the countryside, wound up in the Netherlands. Spent time in the Soviet Union right before the fall of Communism, adventures there inspired a string of stories (The Soothsayer, The Break-In Artist, Smuggling the Dead, and others. Went back to Europe in 98, rented an apartment in Florence and then headed north through France and England. Finally ended up on Ireland’s west coast. Revisited England in 2001, visiting filmmakers Charly Cantor, David Chapman, and David Slade. And, I attended World Horror in March.

3. Coffee, tea, or milk?

4. What else can you do besides write?As a singer-songwriter in the 1970s (we called ourselves folksingers then), I supported myself as an undergrad by playing the coffeehouse and festival circuits. I have continued to perform and record off and on ever since. I’m currently working with the Laughrey Connolly Band.

5. Who are you reading right now?Mike Ashley: Transformations, the second installment in his four volume history of the SF magazines. Highly recommended.

6. Pop culture or academia?What’s the difference? Oh yes, pop pays.

7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote?8. Where do you find your inspirations to write?9. Food you could eat everyday.10. Are you into sports or other physical activities?11. What kind of music speaks to you?

12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride?Both, actually. I do the outline for the aerial view. Then I drop down and explore the terrain. When I get lost (as often happens) I go aloft again and reexamine the grand scheme. I suppose we could call this the yo-yo approach.

13. Celebrity crush.14. Who are the biggest influences on your work?15. Do you still watch cartoons?

NEWS Lettered Edition of Ambasadora

PUBLICATIONS I am so excited to share this special lettered hardcover edition of AMBASADORA: Marked By Light from Dog Star Books . There ...

NEWS Starrie in Publishers Weekly

Nice review from Publisher's Weekly for Starrie (From the World of Ambasadora)!
"Miller’s short third novel in the space-faring, caste-bound, hierarchically polyamorous, and socially striated Ambasadora universe (after 2013’s Greenshift) manages to balance the exoticized presentation of the setting with relatable human interaction...the romance between Ben and Naela highlights the emotional side of reaching out to those who are different from you, even in a world where those differences are stylized and codified."

TALKING ABOUT THE AMBASADORA SERIES

"AMBASADORA has a lot to say about the human spirit and it says it well." -MIKE RESNICK Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Author of the Santiago series

TALKING ABOUT MAN OF WAR

Science fiction is full of tales of displaced heroes, finding themselves involved in the conflicts of their adoptive worlds....Heidi Ruby Miller really runs with this concept, as Two Hawks finds himself equally used and abused by pretty much everyone he comes into contact with. Being a novella, it’s a fairly quick read, action-packed and gripping....I generally like to find something to criticise, no matter how small, just to avoid being taken for one of the current rash of meaningless five star reviewers that currently infest the internet, but I honestly couldn’t find anything to complain about. I genuinely hope Miller and Meteor House plan on continuing the story with further books." -DAVE BRZESKI, British Fantasy Society

TALKING ABOUT MANY GENRES

"...a beautiful and insightful must-have book for any writer, from newbie to working pro. Highly recommended!" -JONATHAN MABERRY NYT Bestselling Author of the Joe Ledger series

TALKING ABOUT STARRIE

"Take authentic, straight-ahead space opera. Stir in a highly trained, kick-ass assassin on a mission of vengeance. Toss in a career soldier and watch them battle together, and grow together, as adversity piles on. Serve hot! Heidi Ruby Miller’s STARRIE serves up the perfect concoction of nonstop, take-no-prisoners SF action and romance, set against the intriguing backdrop of the brutal and dangerous world of AMBASADORA, and deftly leaves us wanting more." -Win Scott Eckert, coauthor with Philip José Farmer of The Evil in Pemberley House and author of The Scarlet Jaguar, winner of the 2014 New Pulp Award

TALKING ABOUT MARKED BY LIGHT

"With an anthropologist’s eye for world building and an engaging fast-paced style, Heidi Ruby Miller hurtles her characters through a dystopian labyrinth in which hollow beauty is revered and love a virtual crime." -Christopher Paul Carey, SWORDS AGAINST THE MOON MEN

TALKING ABOUT MAN OF WAR

"More than just demonstrating how the best science fiction thrills with action, and explores romance in new and unexpected ways, Heidi Ruby Miller gives us something equally important -- representation, through an exploration of Farmer's classic Iroquois character Two Hawks. Anyone interested in page-turners with diversity should stop what they're doing and read Man of War." -John Edward Lawson, Bram Stoker Award finalist and author of Bibliophobia

TALKING ABOUT STARRIE

"STARRIE is one ripping fast book and a well told story. I loved it!" --Basil Sands, The Big Thrill

TALKING ABOUT GREENSHIFT

TALKING ABOUT HEIDI'S WRITING

"...a writer-crush on Heidi Ruby Miller. I mean, holy crap, this girl can write! This is how you write Science-Fiction." -CARY CAFFREY Bestselling Author of The Girls from Alcyone trilogy

TALKING ABOUT STARRIE

"Miller’s short third novel in the space-faring, caste-bound, hierarchically polyamorous, and socially striated Ambasadora universe (after 2013’s Greenshift) manages to balance the exoticized presentation of the setting with relatable human interaction...the romance between Ben and Naela highlights the emotional side of reaching out to those who are different from you, even in a world where those differences are stylized and codified." -Publisher's Weekly

TALKING ABOUT MARKED BY LIGHT

"Talk about an outlaw hero that is larger than life. Talk about a hero who changes worlds." -JENNA BENNET NYT Bestselling Author of The Fortune series

TALKING ABOUT HEIDI'S STORIES

TALKING ABOUT STARRIE

"With explosive action, kick-ass heroes and romance that hits all the right notes, STARRIE gives fans of science fiction romance everything they want—at a breakneck pace. Plan to stay up all night finishing this one, it’s impossible to put down!" - RHONDA MASON Author of The Empress Game